BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

and study for several months in Germany during the winter of 1798-9. He nonetheless found
Kant’s moral teaching “stoical and loveless” and rejected what he considered Goethe’s “blasphe-
mous” paganism and immorality. 89 While Coleridge’s praises of German literature caught the
attention of his contemporaries, his generalizations and comments seem to anticipate much of the
criticism of the following century. “There is a nimiety, a too-muchness in all Germans,” he
wrote in his Table Talk (c. 1835), “it is the national fault.” He imputed to the Germans a moral
ambiguity and considered them not poets but “good metaphysicians and critics: they criticized on
principles previously laid down.” According to Coleridge, German literary style was “merely a
method acquired by them as we have acquired a style.” 90 Such were the faint praises of one of
the era’s foremost literary figures.
Madame de Staël’s Germany redeemed to some extent the blackened reputations of
Goethe and Schiller and generated much popular interest in German literature. Her explanation
of the English prejudice against German literature rested principally on a difference in national
character: the Germans “take pleasure in the ideal” while the English love “their laws, their
manners, and their forms of worship.” “The Germans,” she wrote, “are to the human mind what
pioneers are to an army,” while the English have “a dread of new systems.” 91 De Staël’s work
inspired Thomas Carlyle, Britain’s greatest champion of German culture during the nineteenth
century, who improved receptivity to German literature through his literary, historical and critical
German literature. See also Morgan, British Magazines, 51.
89 Mander, Our German Cousins, 132, 138, 149.
90 Table Talk, 2:54, 344; Allsop Letters, 2:4, quoted in Stokoe, German Influences, 142.
91 de Staël, Germany, 1:150-51.
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